Decentralized Web Server:
At the first Decentralized Web Summit Tim Berners-Lee asked if a content-BK and TBLaddressable peer-to-peer server system scales to the demands of the World Wide Web. This is meant to be a partial answer to a piece of the puzzle. For background, this might help.
Decentralized web pages will be served by users, peer-to-peer, but there can also be high-performance super-nodes which would serve as caches and archives. These super-nodes could be run by archives, like the Internet Archive, and ISPs who want to deliver pages quickly to their users. I will call such a super-node a “Decentralized Web buy sales lead Server” or “D-Web Server” and work through a thought experiment on how much it would cost to have one that would store many webpages and serve them up fast.
Web objects, such as text and images, in the Decentralized Web are generally retrieved based on a computed hash of the content. This is called “content addressing.” Therefore, a request for a webpage from the network will be based on its hash rather than contacting a specific server. This object can be served from any D-Web server without worrying that it will be faked because the contents will be checked to make sure it is the right content by rehashing it and checking to make sure it was right.
For the purposes of this post, we will use the basic machines that the petabox-in-great-roomInternet Archive currently uses as a data point. These are 24-core, 250TByte disk storage (on 36 drives), 192GB RAM, 2Gbit/sec network, 4u height machines that cost about $14k.